Thread by @SarahJamieLewis

As PoS is seen as inevitable for some cryptos there is an interesting meta shift away from "stop saying our consensus is centralized" towards "yes, the consensus is 'technically' centralized but *how* we arrive at consensus is less important than *what* we do with the consensus"

A few years ago i think I would have been under the impression that such rhetoric would effectively kill a community as they drop their committent to decentralization and concentrate power in a few hands.

lol

It feels like we are heading towards a point where there are the very few PoW currencies that have enough staying power to survive, and the rest of crypto will blend into a handful of very centralized payment processing hubs.

All claiming victory.

And by "centralized" I mean "censored". Perhaps that is a fundamentally unfair characterization and there is some nice privacy tech that mitigates the worst kinds of censorship is some interesting ways - I wonder how far that argument realistically goes.

Eternal September is a very real phenomenon and the early ideas are easily sacrificed on the alter of scale and legibility.

I look deeply at some of these newer systems and my only though is -there is nothing here-

Then I remember that I have been here a long time, my brain irreparably mangled by the ideals of the early internet.

I will never trust anyone to not do evil with a centralized system because I'm simply incapable of of that trust. There is no argument that could persuade me.

Very aware that last sentence is indicative of an ideology that isn't grounded in rationality. And yet...

Censorship resistance isn't valued until it is already too late to acquire it.

Decentralization requires constant action against a never ending onslaught of "optimizations".

There are very real consequences when those properties are no longer seen as foundational.

I completely forgot I wrote this...

https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1418274296988721156

Wow I was in more sardonic mood than usual last July...anyway I said all of the above much better in that article.

I feel we just dance around this point endlessly.